CURATORIAL NOTE

Blue is bunting, indigo and quick. Blue is jay, its chatter like jazz. Blue is grosbeak is bluebird is blackbird turned sky. The Chisos mountains at dusk are blue. Blue is ghost-like. Twilight. Deep border blue. Once is the blue moon where panthers dance. Twice is the blue belly of lizards flashing. Blue waves are heat waves, dervishes in sand. Blue is the long song of storm clouds gathering with rain.

Terry Tempest Williams

The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks

After the spectacle of the sunset and before the promises of sunrise, the world is gradually cloaked in shades of blue. Blue Hour. Neither night, nor day. Neither here, nor there.

Both.

And.

Here, you have entered a space between. Between your outside life and this temporary interior world. Between reality and representation. Between concept and craft. Between foreign and familiar. Between you and me.

This exhibition explores times of transition, liminal space, and metamorphosis. Change is one of the surest experiences of the human condition, and the hovering poetic moments both in and out of time, this metaphorical blue hour, offers us a space to be fully present in the in-between.

Blue hour is a bit of a misnomer. Not usually a full hour, its length changes with the transitions of this pale blue dot from one point in space to another, from season to season. It’s difficult to pinpoint an exact moment blue hour begins or ends. It both fades and grows. Both gradual and fleeting. Belonging to both the day and the night, belonging to neither, a phenomenon in its own right. This exhibition leverages the static nature of visual artwork as a model for how we might become reflective, become more still, become more present in pivotal moments between two states.

Works from over 50 artists explore visions of the landscape at Blue Hour, the coming of age, the transitions of caring for aging family or one’s aging self, of social and technological transitions, of refugees here and there, of spiritual transformations from life to death, to afterlife. Artists have rendered the feeling of calm of a blue horizon over the ocean, the feeling of satisfaction at the closing of day welllived, or that deeper shade of “feeling blue” —melancholy, mourning, and longing we might all have known at some time, or know more often than sometimes.

Perhaps “feeling blue” is like the tint of a distant horizon, of the mountains far off. The blue Rebecca Solnit describes as, “the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here… the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in…”

Blue is a color at the furthest reaches of the visible spectrum. A color that we can never inhabit. A color of light we have learned is not healthy for us to inhabit. The blue of distance is an emblem of that which we cannot possess. Goethe in his 1810 Theory of Colors writes, “we love to contemplate blue…not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it.” Disquieting wanderlust can consume our present if we cannot befriend desire on its own terms. Maria Popva muses, “We seek to silence it either by grasping toward its object in hungry hope of consummation, or with the restless resistance of denial and suppression.” But what if? What if, as Rebecca Solnit so tenderly proposes, “[desire] could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance? …for something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them and the blue instead tints the next beyond.”

What if, like the poet Keats, we could find a “Negative Capability,” an agility to float in the unknown, undefined mystery of our blue hours and in them find beauty. Not by doing more or less, traveling further or deeper, but by staying right here. When you step out into darkness, at first you believe you cannot see. But the remarkable apparatus of the eye slowly adjusts until the deepest blacks become subtle shapes of indigo and navy and prussian and ultramarine blue and we can miraculously find our way in this shadowed world. If you haven’t stepped out into the darkness lately, try it sometime. If we stay right here, in the precipice of the present, we do in fact possess this blue. Our eyes and hearts behold the expansive melancholy of time and space, of light and dark, of beauty in the faraway, of the peaceful falling dusk, and the hope of dawning resurrection.

My hope for you is that this gallery space, this collection of visual meditations, and these written thoughts may be a blue hour of sorts, that invite you into a moment of reflection, of stillness, of acceptance, and perhaps even love for the joys and griefs, and all the transitions and longings of exactly the place you are now.

Sarah Bernhardt

Brian Alexander

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Blue hour for me speaks to an experiential continuum that is our shared perception of being alive on Earth. The ebb and flow of something to nothing and back again on an array of time scales from seconds to seasons to millennia. In my own work, I offer the “crumbs” of experience, the otherwise overlooked or voiceless which I expand upon and push to the foreground for consideration. I feel much is lost or ignored in the gaps or “blue space” as it is perceived as nothing of value. Yet a cloudy night sky still has the stars above it. Everything is here all the time - it’s our awareness that shifts, creating contrasts in experience. I believe everything is born from the gaps. When we are presented with something we don’t recognize, for a split second our minds are out of a job. We can feel a spaciousness in ourselves, our greater intelligence comes forward and for just a moment we are grounded and arguably better because we are open to the unknown.

Michele Borgarelli

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Photographer Michele Borgarelli has spent the last two years honing his ability to fix his photographs with the emotion of a given moment. Technology has both such power to distract us from the presence of the blue hour, but also an incredible capacity as a tool to focus our attention on it. This image, so effortlessly, renders not only the beautiful light and unique color of the Blue Hour, but also an emotional space that could both be the calm of closure or a beckoning of beginning. We could be coming or going, or just sitting still taking in this sight. An unassuming yet slightly odd intervention of a ladder affixed in this natural environment is the transition between in and out, between the constructed and the natural, between gravity and weightlessness. Are you ready to dip your toes?

Image opposite : The Ladder

Charles Bosco

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Rather than directly depicting images of landscape, my work looks at the tools that are used to describe and define land, either for purposes of documentation and preservation, or to substantiate right of use. Tools like mapping, film stills, mythic symbols of early American landscapes, or legal language are combined and overlaid with my own invented landscapes. This work specifically explores text and language as a way to describe the landscape. Thread simultaneously damages and repairs the surface, allowing for original meaning to be subverted and new narratives to emerge. Image opposite : It Seeps

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Design and vibrant colors dominate the perception of the twilight hour. The endless change of blue shadows requires experimentation, and variation both in content and technique. Many moods are created by the relationship between glowing light and dark patterns of people coming and going in their subtle checkerboard space of life.

Image opposite : Twilight Zone

Madeline Brenner

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Madeline Brenner uses the alternative photographic process known as cyanotype with salt crystallization. What was once an experiment to control a fluid process, to contain the water and chemical reaction, quickly revealed itself as a lesson in letting go and trusting the process. The fluidity of water has consistently been an inspiration that continues to be explored in her work. As an art therapist, Madeline uses this creative technique as a meditation and intrinsic centering practice as well.

Image opposite : Luminance in Waces and Beyond the Boundary